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What does YETI do?

The project promotes the idea of self employment to young people as a viable route to employment and creates learning opportunities that enable them to explore this option further. For those that want to progress, it provides a new approach and a new pedagogy for entrepreneurship training using teams of Young Ambassadors, 20 in total in the pilot, who are themselves successful young entrepreneurs to act as role models, deliver workshops and peer support through a young entrepreneur network.

Project outputs
The project outputs include all the materials and resources that other organisations need to replicate the model together with a training video. The materials include a Training the Trainer pack for training the Young Ambassadors in workshop design, presentation skills, coaching and mentoring skills as well as an innovative curriculum and and methodology for entrepreneurship education.

There are a set of detailed entrepreneurship training modules complete with indicative content, trainer notes and a menu of activities. This is supported by a large databank of web based multimedia materials so that the programme can be delivered on line as well as face-to-face.

Why YETI?

The incentive for this project was that outside the formal education system, existing structures for supporting young entrepreneurs are not working. The popular ‘one-stop-shop’ model presupposes that someone already has a business idea and focuses on how this can be taken to market. Young people need much earlier intervention to help them think creatively and generate the ideas. Also there is a problem of scale and the standard formal instruments (such as bank-generated business plans etc) do not meet the needs of, for example, the 16 yr old who wants to start a window cleaning round. Nor do the existing agencies actually provide real entrepreneurship skills training or help young people set up alternative business models such as social enterprises.

Demographic

There is no specific demographic targeted by the project but because all four partners are based in areas of high social deprivation, high unemployment, low educational achievement and an average of 25% of the population with household incomes below the official poverty line, many of the participants will be suffering from multiple disadvantage.

Core skills

A focus of the training for aspiring entrepreneurs is the embedding of communication, numeracy and IT skills into the technical training they receive in the workshops. The topics are also very different including using story-telling as a business tool, creating radio programmes about their business, using video workshops, creating digital histories and so on.

Open Badges and Youthpass

Another output is the creation of a suite of Mozilla Open badges for Young Entrepreneurs and a map of the entrepreneur competences they acquire against the Youthpass competences – which will together provide the accreditation and certification framework.